The Ringtail

I got my log-in for Diaspora today. I registered with them a while ago as I liked the idea of what they are aiming to do, and I was pleased that they have carried on and look to have made a great job of it. Trouble is, I already find that I can’t keep up with all of this stuff, so I now need to make a decision on which to keep.

The candidates are:

• identi.ca: great community, interesting people, lively debate – a keeper
• twitter: lots of people I know in the real world, but not much community and can’t see it growing for me
• Google+: nice features, but it doesn’t feel right to me. Quite a crowd of folks I already know from other services, but I don’t see much traffic that interests me
• Facebook: Old school friends that don’t use any other services, but abhorrent privacy polisy that will only ever get worse
• Flickr: can’t remember last time I logged in

OK, so there’s only 5 here, but that’s a lot of time to check all, and because I think cross-posting is shameful and rude, I am trying to juggle different aspects of online sharing on each. Net result is that I don’t really share as much as I might because it’s too much of a drag.

I think I’m going to stick with identi.ca for shorter posts and ‘chat’ and will hope that Diaspora catches on with enough people for it to be valuable to me. Two key things stick out from thinking about this stuff:

• federation is key – if you can run a service (such as statusnet or Diaspora) yourself while still connecting with others, you have the best of all worlds. Everyone can be part of the community that means something to them, but still participate in the wider ecosystem. I hope these services catch on and usurp the ‘one site to rule them all’ mentality of the others.
• aspects (in Diaspora, ‘circles’ in Google+) are a useful idea, but I miss the view onto a users whole profile. On identi.ca you see everything that everyone posts (apart from DMs) and I think this is great. On Google+ I am connected to a whole host of folks, but can’t help feel that it’s all a little redundant if I’m not in any of their circles.

Exciting times, and I am really keen to see where all these services lead. It’s great that people are trying to do something genuinely different rather than trying to just be ‘the new Facebook’, and I hope that true collaboration and sharing can win over advertising, greed and ‘monetization’. Excuse me, I have to go and wash my fingers after typing that word.

I read a short story ages ago by Peter Carey; it was in ‘The Fat Man in History’ collection but I can’t remember which story it was. I don’t think I ever really ‘got it’, but one phrase has stuck with me, “now I’m older I can make a barley sugar last all day” (I’m paraphrasing). I always found this evocative, and I understood it to mean taking care to do things right, to take time and take pride in doing something mundane fully. Probably not what he meant, but I always think of this whenever I catch myself thinking, “slow down, things are being done wrong here”.

Last night I had decided to finalise a couple of admin things on tasksapp – things that I can easily change in the database for my use, but which need to made visible to other users to be able to amend themselves. I got this done and was fixing a few glitches in testing when I had a barley sugar moment. Sure, this will work fine, and it will allow me to get logins out to beta testers sooner, but what about long-term? How would I be able to extend this when I need to (as I inevitably will)? Similarly with dealing with registering users; I’ve set up a standalone script to add people who register interest to the database, but again this felt wrong on testing. I have a robust user class that I use to handle all other user interaction, and what I should do is extend this to allow for different user types. All this I know, but the drive to get things ‘finished’ so I could add new people in to run the beta test led me to take a shortcut.

The short point here is that there will be a bit of a delay before I can get logins out for folks to use for testing. However, when I get feedback I will be able to make amends in a much more formalised way, without my (currently stable and clean) codebase becoming clogged up with hastily-written code. Please do register if you’re interested though, but be patient if you don’t get a log-in for a short while!

Only noticed at lunchtime that the script which was set up to capture new registered users had not uploaded to the tasksapp site properly. If, as seems unlikely, you tried to register today and got a strange single-digit response, please try again as all is now ok.

My FTP server seems to be rather flaky so I have had to manually see which files needed updating and uploading them singly through my web server’s control panel. Not great, but at least I’ve seen the problem and can double-check more rigorously next time I upload.

On with the testing and final polishing…

Last night, at 10:38PM, tasksapp went live to the nation to register and help with beta testing. You can sign up by visiting http://www.tasksapp.co.uk/register.

I will be doing some tweaking and finalising this week, but should have trial log-ins out to people early next week. I’m a little scared at putting this out for more people to look at, but I know it needs some user input now if it’s ever going to be more than my own personal tool. Exciting times ahead!

I know the world and his dog have been writing about Google+ in the last few weeks, so forgive me for adding to the pot. I can see a lot of pluses and minuses, and my jury is honestly out on whether I will ever really be a ‘user’ of Google+, but one thing becomes abundantly clear: there are now way too many of these types of services.

Don’t get me wrong, choice can be a great thing, but the problem with social services is that everyone has to use the same one for it to be truly valuable – Google+, Facebook or Twitter would be utterly pointless without any connections to share with. In this world, choice is bad because the best service will be the one that most of your friends are on. You may think Zuckerberg is evil, or that Twitter is too full of celebs, but while you have friends that you value online interaction with on those services, you can’t leave.

There have been attempts to get round this. TweetDeck (and some others) allows you to write one message and send it to many services at once, and will also aggregate messages from your friends on other services in one window. Sign up to them all and then let the client software do the work to keep you in touch with everyone. But this is only a hack; as anyone who follows more than a handful of people one all services will know, there’s nothing worse than getting multiple copies of someone’s messages as they are now telling all their social networks what they had for breakfast in one go. There is a special place reserved in hell for those who are actually copying and pasting messages to all services – really, you are not that important.

The problem is not really with any one service – despite what Facebook’s detractors may have you believe – it’s that none of them allow you to venture outside their closed garden and engage with others.

Google+ is making steps in the right direction. Circles are a great way to manage lots of people and only send messages to those you want to see them. Leaving aside the fact that the service still relies on everyone moving in before its truly useful there are other issues to be resolved – what if you send a message slagging off your boss to only a close group of friends, but one of them shares that with a circle that includes your boss? Caveat Emptor in spades.

StatusNet is looking even more promising in that it provides a framework for people to create networks for small groups of people, but then allows you to cross-subscribe. If I use identi.ca and someone else uses another service we can still subscribe to each other. It does rely on everyone using the same underlying framework, but then so do the web, email, SMS, et al. If all the social networks could decide on a standardised message and subscription format then everyone would be free to use the service they prefer, but also to communicate and share with users in other services. We do it with email and texting – everyone has a unique identifier (email address or mobile number) and anyone who knows it can send them a message. While social networking services merely aim to ring-fence and divide users we can safely assume that the battle is for eyeballs to monetize rather than a genuine desire to allow people to socialise. And that’s a shame.